day and nobody wants to relive. violence on january 6th doesn t justify weaponizing the government against people who were innocent and did nothing wrong. thank you for blowing the whistle on that. i yield back. i have a sincere point of inquiry. rule 11, clause two. the gentleman is not recognized. i have a question about the rules. point of order question about the rules. state your point of order. it is why does rule 11 clause two subsection e1a not apply to this subcommittee? i can read for you. each committee shall keep a complete record of all committee action which shall include in the case of a meeting or hearing trance apt a substantially verbatim account of remarks actually made during the proceeding subject only to some technical things. such records shall be the property of the house and each member delegate and the resident commissioner shall have access
you do wonder, is it going to be that every politician who loses is going to go to court, tie up judges and claim that they didn t lose when they clearly have, is there such a thing of a penalty if a judge decides this is a frivolous lawsuit? first, can every politician challenge their loss in court, in theory, yes, and we should encourage that because the courts are certainly a better place to do it than say storming a capitol building, so using legal recourse is the best outcome, but when does it case go from, i think i should have won to frivolous. well, there is a standard for that in federal court it s called rule 11 but the bottom line is, what did they know when they filed? did they know that this was hopeless? or more, did they know that it was not grounded in any way in either existing law or an argument for the creation of a new law. if that s the case, that s the frivolous standard. i think in the future we continue to encourage politicians to take the claims
that becomes harassing. and at some point in that pattern of conduct, a judge or a group of judges become frustrated. there s a waste of court resources, and they will use rule 11 sanctions to tell that litigant, you ve got to quit doing this. but it takes a lot for judges to reach that threshold. i think that s what happened here. the court is out of patience, it may signal to other courts that this is now one of those annoying litigants who brings repeated cases that are meritless. and in the context of this particular case, right, this is trump suing hillary clinton, the dnc, others who are members of the dnc, but also individual fbi agents, and saying that they created a false narrative about his campaign s willingness to engage with russia during the 2016 campaign. and he files this after the senate intelligence committee, which is led by republicans at the time, issues a bipartisan report that concludes that paul
miami who were in the same circuit, the 11th circuit, which really doesn t use rule 11 very often. i wanted to confirm with them that it was used rarely in miami and they told me, yes, this is very unusual. i sends a strong message and i think you re right when they say, this will catch the attention of other federal judges and it will in many ways lead to a new way for the former president to be treated in federal court, at least. so joyce, you and i are both law professors. we ve read cases regarding rule 11. we ve read opinions for rule 11 sanctions. can you contextualize this for the viewers? this was a really blistering decision. how harsh was it in the broader context of these kinds of things? so, here s, i think, a good analogy to help people understand what happened. there are some people who are repetitious litigants. by that i mean, people who don t really have any sort of after case, but who file lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit in a way
been filed in that same court before that same judge. trump had alleged that james repeatedly abused her position, pursuing a personal vendetta against him. to discuss this, we bring in our msnbc contributor and former federal prosecutor, joyce vance. joyce, i felt the heat coming off of this opinion. this seems like a real turning point in how the federal courts are going to deal with donald trump. is that your take? so, i think it s important to have context. the rule that the judge used to sanction trump here, federal rule 11 impose sanctions in cases that they deem to be frivolous. the rule doesn t say this, but judges interpret that to mean utterly frivolous. they don t bend over backwards to use this rule. these sorts of sanctions are very rarely imposed. i talked with some colleagues in